Am I making the correct approach to advertising?

[ponyboy]

I've got a small website that is full of interesting content. We experimented with selling some banner ads and we had decent success and generated a little bit of revenue.

We've decided to expand our advertising and we created more banner spots, made some redesigns of the site and upgraded a few things to keep people coming back and make it a more pleasant experience.

Now, due to the content (not adult) we can't use Google or Yahoo advertising so in my limited advertising experience it appears that we are limited to selling our own banner spots or accepting affiliate advertising.

We've setup an advertising page that gives all of the info for potential advertisers and I've contacted a bunch of potential advertisers in our industry to let them know about the new advertising opprotunities.

Now I'm second guessing on whether we should concentrate on selling the banners or whether we would make more money going the affiliate route or do we have other viable options?

I appreciate any help.

Michael

[idolw]

heh, go for more money.
problem is: only you can tell what akes more money for you. after testing.

[greenleaves]

Ditto what was said above, it is simple;
Test to see what makes you more money.

Also, other Google, there are also other PPC engines which will take the business Google and the other big players reject.

[ponyboy]

That's kind of what I was edging towards and what we will continue to do then. We've had several large companies and a radio show contact us wanting to purchase advertising. I think we will sell what ads we can, swap out some radio advertising in exchange for advertising on our site and I'll use affiliates for the rest.

Besides the radio spot we'll have I'm thinking about purchasing some other advertisements. Up until now, we have never advertised at all since the site has been up (about 1.5 - 2years) and we've built up decent traffic without it. We've got a Google PR of 5 and we're getting around 1,500 unique visitors a day and about 330,000 page views per month. So I'm kind of excited to see what a little advertising will do.

Another question, I see a bunch of affiliates but what are the best ones to use? I've already signed up at commission junction, but where else should I go? I'm assuming that I can mix and match the ad spots with different affiliates correct, or am I stuck with one? I'll admit, I didn't read all of the fine print yet.

Thanks again for the help guys.

Michael

[fi5hbone]

Advertising is only one way to generate revenue. I see that you have already dwealt into affiliate programs, which are a good way of creating revenue. Shareasale is also another excellent way of generating revenue.

[rfung]

try also adbrite.

[ponyboy]

Just a quick update, we ran affiliates for about a week and made virtually nothing. Our click through rate was terrible and out of the ones that did click we made one sale. We removed all of the large affiliate banners but left some of the small ones and signed up for CPM ads. After messing with that for a couple of days we're generating about $20/day in revenue from 4 ads per page with about a 50% fill.

I've applied to a few more CPM advertisers and once we get approved for them we'll change our unpaid default views from our current network over to the other networks which should help us fill in the defaults and hopefully double our revenue from those 4 spots. Then we'll start working on eliminating our other affiliate ads and replace them with CPM.

Anybody else have any other ideas on maximizing revenue? In the past we've done zero advertising, so once we have our ad network setup and everything in place to maximize that way we plan on doing a little advertising to start diving more new users to the site. I'm just wanting to make sure that we're not missing anything else.